From Good to Very Good: The Role of Leadership in Driving School Improvement

Abstract

Despite sustained regulatory investment in private education across Sharjah, 84.37% of inspected schools have not progressed beyond a ‘Good’ rating, exposing a critical deficiency in how leadership translates external accountability into sustainable internal improvement. This convergent mixed-methods case study investigated the leadership mechanisms that enabled one large, dual-curriculum private school to achieve the transition from ‘Good’ to ‘Very Good’ under the SPEA framework between 2023 and 2025. The study was framed by the Integrated Improvement Model, operationalising three domains: Disturbed Agency, the Cycle of Forensic Inquiry, and Intelligent Accountability. Data were collected through a bilingual practitioner survey (n = 79), semi-structured leadership interviews (n = 7, with five thematically coded in MAXQDA), and the documentary analysis of four institutional and regulatory sources. Triangulated findings demonstrated that the improvement was system-driven rather than leader-dependent: deliberately engineered distributed structures, forensic data triangulation practices, and a reconstituted governance architecture collectively produced the rating upgrade – independently verified by an SPEA (2025) inspection. Three evidence-based recommendations are proposed: institutionalising professional learning communities, implementing a unified data platform, and empowering middle leaders to integrate strategic initiatives into coherent pedagogical actions. This study provides the first empirical analysis of school improvement within the SPEA regulatory context.